Saturday, July 25, 2009

Synaptics touchpad suddenly stopped working (Vista laptop)

I thought it was after I had unplugged an external USB mouse from it, after hitting the power key to suspend it. A couple days ago the synt_whatever.dll had crashed, so I lost the scroll features on the touchpad, but regular mouse movement and clicking were fine. I expected they would resume after a reboot. Also this day I had plugged into a projector (external video: Fn-F5), and at one point also hit mute (Fn-F8).

I tried rebooting a couple times--it's the Windows way--but that didn't make a difference.

Looked in the synaptics utility that shows in the systray--thought I saw something there about enabling touchpad/usb mouse simultaneously, and maybe a toggle would fix that. Nothing.

The device manager said everything was running fine. I figured I would probably have to uninstall and re-install drivers, because Windows just breaks, and this is something you have to accept.

Well, after a little search, seeing people had problems installing the driver, or the ALPS driver worked for them, I saw one that said 'try Fn-F7.'

About Me

I have worked mostly with small companies / start-ups, building whatever is required and chasing moving targets. I still do some of this, keeping up on technology, tools, and trying to stay bleeding edge. (There's too many edges though.)

I like to know how things work, including the internet, physics, science, chemistry, biology.